The dastardly Mr Deedes

Insurance giant Lloyd’s of London has written to staff this week to inform them that alcohol consumption is now forbidden between the hours of 9am and 5pm. ‘Drinking during these times is considered gross misconduct and may result in summary dismissal,’ reads a memo. A retired underwriter tells me: ‘This is sad to hear. My department routinely headed off for 11am sharpeners at The Elephant on Fenchurch Street. Mind you, not all of them are still with us.’ HSBC’s £2.4m-a-year chairman Douglas Flint has been appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury to chair the Just Finance Foundation, a church-backed initiative to promote responsible lending. A wise choice? Nicholas Wilson, a former solicitor whose campaign last month forced HSBC to cough up £4m for unreasonable credit card charges, fumes: ‘This is a joke. HSBC helped crash the world economy.’ Charlotte Hogg as first female Bank of England governor? That’s the talk following her promotion to deputy governor yesterday. For a brief time, it was thought ambitious former BBC hackette Stephanie Flanders might be heading that way. She was linked with ex-deputy governor Charlie Bean’s job in 2014, but nabbed a more lucrative post as a £400,000-a-year analyst for JP Morgan. United Breweries yesterday asked scandal-hit tycoon Vijay Mallya to step down as chairman after he was charged with fraud. Meanwhile, authorities in Delhi stepped up their bid to extradite him from the UK by handing over a request to the British consulate. How did the bearded rogue, 61, aka ‘King Of Good Times’, react to this perplexing state of affairs? By retweeting news of Indian cricketing maestro Virat Kohli’s latest century in the Test match against Bangladesh in Hyderabad. BBC business editor and former investment banker Simon Jack’s services are advertised by speaking agency JLA. They rate him as a category ‘B’ speaker, meaning he can charge as much as £10,000 for a talk. Jack’s predecessor at the BBC, Robert Peston, now at little-watched ITV, is also on JLA’s books but as a category ‘A’ speaker, so can command more than double that fee. Oddly, I’ve yet to see self-absorbed Peston crowing about this.